Dead and Alive

Page 25

When James came to the phone, Victor honored him with the news of his promotion and gave him his first assignment as butler. “And remember, James, follow the instructions I’ve just given you to the letter. I expect absolute perfection in everything a butler does, but most especially in this instance.”
AFTER LEAVING HIS UMBRELLA on the terrace and after thoroughly wiping his wet shoes with a cloth that he brought for that purpose, James entered the house on the first floor, by the back door at the end of the north hall.
He carried the mysterious object that had obsessed him for the past two hours: a crystal ball.
After proceeding directly to the library, as Mr. Helios had instructed, James carefully placed the gleaming sphere on the seat of an armchair.
“Are you happy there?” he asked.
The sphere did not reply.
Frowning, James moved it to another armchair.
“Better,” the sphere told him.
When the crystal ball initially spoke to him, two hours earlier, James had been minding his own business, sitting at the kitchen table in the dormitory, stabbing his hand with a meat fork and watching it repeatedly heal. The fact that he healed so quickly and so well gave him reason to believe he would be all right, though for most of the day, he had felt all wrong.
The first thing the sphere said to him was, “I know the way to happiness.”
Of course, James at once expressed a desire to know the way.
Since then, the crystal ball had said many things, most of them inscrutable.
Now it said, “Salted or unsalted, sliced or cubed, the choice is yours.”
“Can we get back to happiness?” James asked.
“Use a knife and,” the sphere said.
“And what?” James asked.
“And fork.”
“What do you want me to do with a knife and fork?”
“If peeled.”
“You’re making no sense,” James said accusingly.
“A spoon,” said the sphere.
“Now it’s a spoon?”
“If halved and unpeeled.”
“What is the path to happiness?” James pleaded because he was afraid to demand an answer and offend the sphere.
“Long, narrow, twisting, dark,” said the sphere. “For the likes of you, the path to happiness is one mean sonofabitch of a path.”
“But I can get there, can’t I? Even one like me?”
“Do you really want happiness?” asked the sphere.
“Desperately. Doesn’t have to be forever. Just for a while.”
“Your other choice is insanity.”
“Happiness. I’ll take happiness.”
“Yogurt works with. Ice cream works with.”
“With what?”
The sphere didn’t reply.
“I’m in a very bad way,” James pleaded.
Silence.
Frustrated, James said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back. I’ve got something to do for Mr. Helios.”
He found the hidden switch, a section of the bookcase pivoted, and the secret passageway was revealed.
James glanced back at the sphere on the seat of the armchair. Sometimes it didn’t look like a crystal ball. Sometimes it looked like a cantaloupe. This was one of those times.
The sphere was a crystal ball only when the magic was in it. James feared that the magic might go out of it and never come back.
In the secret passage, he came to the first door and removed all five steel bolts, as he had been instructed.
When he opened the door, he saw the corridor that Mr. Helios had described: copper rods to the left, steel rods to the right. A low, ominous hum.
Instead of going farther, James ran back to the start of the passageway, pushed the button to open the bookcase door from this side, and hurried to the sphere.
“What is the path to happiness?” he asked.
“Some people put a little lemon on it,” said the crystal ball.
“Put lemon on what?”
“You know what your problem is?”
“What is my problem?”
“You hate yourself.”
James had nothing to say to that.
He returned to the secret passageway, but this time he took the crystal ball with him.
VICTOR HAD ASKED JAMES to phone him when the task was completed. Alternately consulting his world-class wristwatch and the dashboard clock of his magnificent sedan, he thought the new butler was taking too long. No doubt, awed by his promotion and by the realization that he would be speaking more often with his maker, James approached his mission with excessive care.
As he waited for the butler’s call, the conviction again rose in him that he was not alone in the Mercedes. This time, he turned to look in the backseat, knowing full well no one was there.
He knew the cause of his edginess. Until James completed the task he had been sent to do, Victor remained mortal, and the world could be denied the shining future that only he could create. As soon as the butler reported completion of the job, Victor could proceed to the farm, face whatever threat might wait there, and be confident that the future would still be his.
CHAPTER 62
CHAMELEON SUSPECTS DECEPTION.
Once again, the PUZZLE smells like both an EXEMPT and a TARGET. The scent of an EXEMPT is far and away stronger than that of a TARGET, but the second scent is definitely present.
The car has been stopped for some time. Yet the PUZZLE does not get out. It sits in silence behind the wheel.
After a while, the PUZZLE makes a phone call. Chameleon listens, hears nothing incriminating.
But the PUZZLE talks about hidden doors and passageways, a hidden room. This suggests but does not prove bad behavior.
Chameleon assumes that EXEMPTS are incapable of bad behavior. But its program is not clear on this point.
It is permitted to act on assumptions, but they must be Class A assumptions, which in a rigorous application of logic, must conform to at least four of five proofs. This assumption is Class C.
Chameleon is capable of impatience. It has been a long time between kills.
It remembers clearly three kills. They occurred during its testing phase.
The pleasure is intense. The word Chameleon knows for the pleasure that comes from killing is orgasm.
Its entire body spasms. In orgasm, it is as fully in touch with its body as it will ever be—but, strangely, at the same time seems to escape its body and for a minute or two is not itself, is not anything, is only pleasure.
After the phone call, the PUZZLE sits in silence again.
Chameleon was a long time in the cold. A long time in the imprisoning polymeric-fabric sack.
Now it is warm.
Under the pleasing scent, the infuriating scent.
Chameleon wants an orgasm. Chameleon wants an orgasm. Chameleon wants an orgasm.
CHAPTER 63
UNDER THE DUMP, Carson and Michael and Deucalion followed the landfill workers and the resurrected Alphas along a passageway that branched off the main course. It would lead them out of the landfill and under the tank farm next door.
Ahead of them, torchlight ignited faux fire across the glazed curves of the tunnel. Because they were at the end of the procession, an inky gloom pooled behind them.
The Resurrector was far in front. Perhaps it had already entered the main building at the tank farm.
Carson had no concern about the darkness at her back. Here, in the warren of their monstrously strange accomplice, they were safer than they had been in a long time.
“What it does telepathically,” Deucalion said, “is project its inner nature in order to screen from us its physical appearance, because it would be impossible for most people who see it to believe it’s benign.”
Like Carson, Deucalion and Michael had been suspicious of the telepathically projected image and had been strong-willed enough to peer through the Resurrector’s radiant veil to the truth of its form. Deucalion had seen it twice, once for perhaps half a minute.
Michael achieved only the brief glimpse that Carson had seen. In spite of his tendency toward cynicism, he was convinced that the creature could be trusted, that it was allied with them. “If not, it could have killed us all back there, as big and powerful as it is.”
“None of the landfill workers saw through its disguise or even suspects there is one,” Deucalion said. “I doubt that the Alphas, Erika Four and the others, have any suspicion, either. They and the Resurrector are of the same flesh that Victor engineered for the New Race, and perhaps that renders them more susceptible than we are to its masquerade.”
“I was plenty susceptible,” Michael said. “I felt as if I was in an anteroom of Heaven, getting a pep talk from an archangel while waiting for judgment.”
“Why make a thing that looks … like that?” Carson wondered.
Deucalion shook his head. “That it should look like that was not Victor’s plan. Physiologically, it’s a gone-wrong. In its mind, in its intentions, it’s a gone-right.”
The tunnel ceased to pass through compacted trash. Abruptly, its walls were formed of earth, coated with the glossy material that had sealed over the trash in the main passageway and in the first part of this one.
The Resurrector was a digger of considerable industry.
“Will he really come here?” Carson wondered.
“He will,” Deucalion assured her.
“But Erika Four says she’s called him twice. He knows she’s up here somewhere, reanimated. He knows something unprecedented must be happening.”
As Deucalion looked down at her, the light of the centuries-old storm throbbed through his eyes. “He’ll come nevertheless. He’s got too much invested in the tank farm, a new crop birthing in less than twenty-four hours. Mercy gone, this is his best bet. He’s arrogant and insanely certain of himself. Never forget the pride that drives him. Perhaps in all of history, there has been only one other whose pride was greater than Victor’s.”
Maybe the caffeine tide pulsing through Carson was brewing up new symptoms or maybe sleep deprivation torqued her mind in spite of the NoDoz-cola cocktails. Whatever the cause, a fresh anxiety began to pluck at her. She was not a seer, not a Gypsy with one eye in the future, but a prickly intuition warned her that even if Victor died in the next few hours, the world he wanted to make was a world of which others dreamed, as well, a world in which human exceptionalism was denied, in which the masses were regimented drones who served an untouchable elite, in which flesh was cheap. Even if Victor received justice and a grave in garbage, Carson and Michael were going to be making a life together in a world ever more hostile to freedom, to human dignity, to love.
As they reached the hole that had been bored through concrete block and into the basement of the main building at the tank farm, Deucalion said, “The first time I saw the Resurrector, before you two arrived, it told me—rather, it impressed on me in that wordless way it makes you know things—that it expects to die tonight, here or at the landfill.”
Michael let his breath out in a hiss. “That doesn’t sound like our side wins.”
“Or,” said Deucalion, “the creature may know that, in winning, sacrifices will have to be made.”
CHAPTER 64
THE BLUE LASER SCANNED JAMES, approved of him, and switched off the security feature that would have fried him crisp if he had been an unwelcome intruder.
Carrying the crystal ball, he went to the second steel door. He put the sphere on the floor while he pulled the five lock bolts from their slots.
“Try prosciutto,” said the crystal sphere.
“That’s ham.”
“It works with.”
“With what?”
“I know the path to happiness,” said the sphere.
Voice tight with frustration, James said, “Then tell me.”
“Paper-thin.”
“What does that mean?”
“Serve it paper-thin.”
The thick door swung open. James had been forbidden to enter the windowless Victorian drawing room. On his way out, he must leave the steel doors open, the exit route unobstructed.
He remained obedient, even in his current state of distraction.
Anyway, he had no interest in that room. Not when happiness might be within his grasp.
The crystal sphere said nothing on the way back to the library.
From the library desk, James phoned Mr. Helios and reported that the task had been completed precisely according to instructions.
The moment James hung up the phone, the sphere said, “You were not made for happiness.”
“But if you know the path …”
“I know the path to happiness.”
“But you won’t tell me?”
“Also works with cheese,” said the sphere.
“So I’m not worthy of happiness. Is that it?”
“You’re just a meat machine.”
“I’m a person,” James insisted.
“Meat machine. Meat machine.”
Furious, James threw the crystal ball to the floor, where it shattered, spilling a mass of slimy yellow seeds and revealing its orange inner flesh.
He stared at it for a while, uncomprehending.
When he looked up, he saw that someone had left a book on the desk: A History of the Troll in Literature. He picked it up with the intention of returning it to its proper place on the shelves.
The book said, “I know the path to happiness.”
With renewed hope and excitement, James said, “Please tell me.”
“Do you deserve happiness?”
“I believe I do. Why shouldn’t I deserve it?”
“There may be reasons.”
“Everyone deserves happiness.”
“Not everyone,” said the book, “but let’s talk about it.”
CHAPTER 65
AS THE GL550 RACED NORTH in the rain, Jocko hoped for more deer. While he hoped, he thought about some things.
Sometimes Jocko thought about big issues. Usually in two-minute segments. Between activities.
Big issues like why some things were ugly, some weren’t. Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.
People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.
Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you got bored. Beat everything with a stick—boring.
Personally, Jocko would be happy to swoon over everything.
Jocko sometimes thought why he had no gen**als. All Jocko had was that funny thing he peed with. It wasn’t gen**als. He called it his swoozle.
Fortunately, it rolled up. Folded away. When not in use.
If it didn’t fold out of sight, crazy drunk hobos would vomit about that, too.
One thing Jocko tried not to think about. About how he was the only one. Only one of his kind. Too sad to think about.